Liberty provides welcome respite, but even it has a purpose

By Christian Lowe / Times staff writer

You could see the strain on Alex Wilschke’s face, even through the camouflage face paint — smeared with dripping sweat in the mid-summer heat.

Two solid weeks of stress and anxiety. The constant shouts of the instructors; the running, the lack of sleep, the shock of new military lifestyle couldn’t be concealed under Wilschke’s streaking green and brown makeup.

“Everyone’s tired and really needs rest. We’re moving slow,” Wilschke, a 24 year old lawyer from St. Joseph, Mich., said in a hushed voice before crawling through the bushes on yet another field exercise.

“We need libo.”

“Libo.” The word means everything to the candidates as they struggle through the grueling weeks of officer training. It means slipping out of the still strange and confusing world of the Marine Corps and back into the comforting arms of the familiar, where khakis and button-downs mingle easily with t-shirts and flip flops.

It means “liberty” from the pain and fatigue of being an officer candidate.

While the word means the same thing to every candidate — a weekend away from the Corps, how they spend that precious time is far from universal.

For James Landree, 31, it means a weekend getaway with his wife at a friend’s house in nearby Fredericksburg, Va.

For Victor Sosa, a 28 year old psychology major from Omaha, Neb., it means a hotel room, a pizza and hours on his cell phone talking to friends and family — and finally getting a good night’s sleep.

But for many of the officer candidates, it means simply hanging out with new friends, catching a ride into town to mingle at the mall and scarfing down a slab of prime rib at the Outback steak house.

Each weekend, after the first two grueling weeks, the officer candidates are allowed to leave the Marine base at Quantico, Va., for an overnight, given free rein to visit Washington, or any of the nearby towns. The aim is to give the would-be officers a chance to blow off some steam.

But there’s a purpose to everything at OCS, and liberty is no different.

Weekend evaluation

Though they don’t know it, the candidates are even being evaluated on liberty. Instructors aren’t lurking in the tattoo parlors or camouflaged as bus boys at the local pizza joint. But they are taking note of who is taking advantage of the free time and who is not.

Liberty offers a chance for a candidate to spend some extra time studying for the military history exam, work on conquering the obstacle course or give their aching muscles some much-needed rest.

Bottom line, if an officer wannabe is skirting the line between success and failure and doesn’t make good use of his or her libo, the instructors take note and factor it into any disciplinary action.

And God forbid you run into any of them while you’re off base if you’re not up to snuff. When 4th Platoon’s Jason Smith got caught wearing jeans instead of khakis by his company executive officer, Capt. Hilary Williams, his transgression put the whole platoon on restriction.

Some candidates, such as the Landree, a prior gunnery sergeant, had a well-formed plan for staying out of trouble. An officer friend living in a nearby town has an extra room, which he offered to Landree’s wife so she could stay near Quantico during her husband’s training.

“I am really psyched to have her nearby,” a grinning Landree said just before departing the base for a weekend with the wife.

But for those without a such a nice hookup, it’s a trip to the mall or the movie theater and an overnight at a nearby hotel.

Off to the mall

In the crowded corridors of the Potomac Mills outlet mall about 10 miles north of Quantico, the candidates mingle together in small pods. They wander around and talk in voices exaggerated by their lack of conversational freedom in the barracks. They laugh a little too loudly, make fun of each other’s first names and more or less make a spectacle of themselves, basking in the freedom of their day of “liberty.”

“That girl thought we worked at the Polo store and asked us if we wanted to employee discount,” said Keith Anthony, 25, of Gilford, Conn., with a grin.

They didn’t take the discount.

“Hey, let’s go to American Eagle Outfitters to look at some chicks,” one of the would-be officers suggests, and about five candidates file into the store.

“They’re all like 16 years old!” another grumbles with apparent frustration, as the cluster of candidates files back out only a few minutes later.

Maybe Landree’s plan isn’t looking so bad after all. And besides, there’s always next weekend.